Chinese charity groups work to rebuild public trust

Chinese charity groups are working to rebuild public trust by boosting transparency after a scandal resulted in a sharp drop in donations last year.

Charity heads said on Tuesday at the ongoing charity exposition in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region that they are making changes to dispell the lingering "public trust crisis" toward the country's charity sector.

Their remarks came amid a sharp drop in donations in China last year, when Guo Meimei, a 20-year-old woman who claimed to hold a senior position with Red Cross Commerce, an institution she said fell under the Red Cross Society of China (RCSC), posted photos of her lavish lifestyle on her microblog.

Irritated Internet users suspected she had embezzled money from the RCSC, China's only national Red Cross Society, which later reported that its credibility had been seriously damaged.

Although the RCSC denied the existence of Red Cross Commerce, the scandal led to an almost 90 percent drop in donations to national charity organizations over the following six months, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

The year of 2011 remained a nightmare for most Chinese charity groups, most of which have seen sharp drops in donations since the scandal.

Statistics from the unofficial China Charity and Donation Information Center showed that total social donations in the country saw a year-on-year drop of 18.7 billion yuan (2.9 billion U.S. dollars) in 2011.

Charity groups attending the exposition said the plunge shocked them and later prompted them to update their donation records on their websites, including donors' names, their donation amounts and how the donations were used.

"We uploaded our donation information from the past two years onto our website in May," said Nan Jing, a senior official with the China Women's Development Foundation attending the exposition.

"It facilitates public supervision," she said.

Other charity leaders also said public supervision is important for rebuilding public trust.

"We never ignored or resisted public doubt or even rebuke toward the country's charity groups," said Tao Ming, vice secretary general of the China Siyuan Foundation for Poverty Alleviation.

"They lead to public supervision, which may help to create more transparent charity groups," Tao said, adding that his foundation has done its best to specify and detail all of its donation records on its website.

"We may even publish the costs as small as each student's train ticket and his insurance for a summer camp activity," he said.

Meanwhile, some charity groups have remained optimistic in their collective drive to restore social donations.

"Altogether, 54 percent of our donations were personal last year," said Jiang Ying, a senior PR official with the China Charity Aid Foundation for Children, which claims to have been completely transparent since it was founded three years ago.

"Through the information on our website, our donors can know which child they are helping," said Jiang. "As long as we maintain the transparency and make every donation work, there will be high enthusiasm for charity in China."